Beyond Identity Closes $100M Round for MFA

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NEW YORK — The multi-factor authentication (MFA) provider Beyond Identity secured $100 million more in financing.

Evolution Equity Partners led the Series C round that was joined by Potentum Partners, Expanding Capital, and HBAM as well as existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Jim Clark, according to Beyond Identity last month.

Beyond Identity will use the funds to expand its research and development and extend its footprint and resources into Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Taher Elgamal, of Evolution Equity Partners and the 2019 Marconi Prize recipient, will join the company’s board.

To date, Beyond Identity has raised $205 million in funding, with a valuation of $1.1 billion.

Beyond Identity, founded in 2020, has grown to over 180 employees across North America and EMEA, including an engineering team with over 100 developers.

In 2021, the company launched its Secure Customers and Secure DevOps products to complement its Secure Work offering and added “dozens of integrations” with identity and cybersecurity products.

Beyond Identify believes passwords are the root cause of the majority of cyber breaches, with phis-able MFA, intercepted 2FA codes, and compromised accounts leading directly to ransomware and account takeover attacks.

Beyond Identity’s MFA is designed to cryptographically bind a user’s identity to their devices.

The system removes passwords from the authentication and account recovery process, “instead of simply obscuring them.”

“As an industry, we are coming dangerously close to being complicit in cybercrime,” said T.J. Jermoluk, co-founder and CEO, Beyond Identity.

“Throwing money at security controls that criminals consistently evade — in an attempt to inexplicably protect and preserve the gaping hole that is passwords — is not only funding failure, it’s knowingly failing companies and customers.”

Elgamal with Evolution Equity Partners said passwords are “still the number one attack vector in most breaches.”

“The industry has made progress to create solutions that shield passwords, but these solutions had both security and usability limitations,” Elgamal said.